ad:tech Sydney 2010

2 days, 3 keynotes, 1 CEO panel, 3 tracks, 140+ speakers, 3 St Patrick’s Day jigs, 4 hashtags, 27 references to Australia as the social network capital of the world, and a record number of delegates. That was ad:tech done for another year.

I heard the familiar post conference murmurs of “nothing new here” but I’d have to disagree. I was disappointed with the very first session of the day – How Relevant is the Concept of a “Big Idea” in Today’s Interactive Landscape. While the speakers all agreed a big idea took conviction and confidence to execute, none seemed to show any conviction or confidence in their thoughts on the subject, sitting on the fence and downplaying prepared examples. Luckily things soon turned around.

Maybe I’m still loyal to my employment history client side (I’ve only worked in an agency starting with Daemon in May last year) but I really feel the marketers stole the show. Rather than hearing agencies repeat what should be done in digital marketing, it was refreshing to hear from companies who had put these into practice and more importantly their learnings from the execution. Favourites here were Margaret Zabel from Lion Nathan, Roger Sharp from Cadbury, Nicole Leeson from Qantas and Gerd Schenkel from UBank.

When you’re in uncharted territories without the luxury of benchmarks and previous experience, you’re always operating in beta

The Lab is the product of learnings from these previous campaigns

Margaret said that Lion Nathan was willing to fail fast and walk away from an idea if it wasn’t working rather than flogging a dead horse. What their campaigns have demonstrated is that while they might walk away from an idea, they won’t walk away from the overall strategy of engaging their audience with branded and user generated content and out of the box thinking.

photo by @lucio_riberio

Qantas and Cadbury proved themselves good listeners, with Nicole Leeson outlining how the Qantas digital strategy involves listening posts in social media despite the decision not to have a voice in the same area. Nicole won the crowd over with gems like “There’s no digital strategy, instead it’s a communication strategy with digital as a tool”.

Cadbury presented in conjunction with their agency The Online Circle who became aware of an issue with vocal Facebook fans protesting against the use of palm oil in Cadbury products. This proactive approach ensured their crisis management strategy could be executed swiftly, minimising further damage to the brand. Roger also admitted Cadbury initially underestimated the scale of the issue and the power of a vocal group of detractors in social media however continued to work with The Online Circle to defuse the situation. Roger noted there are no audiences for your crisis, only varying levels of participants and that they can be detractors or advocates.

Gerd Schenkel earned a few new customers during the CEO panel debate where he discussed UBank’s business model. These points resonated with the audience and were retweeted repeatedly:

Train for skills, hire for values

It’s better to be 10 seconds of someone’s time in their preferred online space than forcing them to your website

UBank customers must register with an email address and mobile number – building from scratch means they can enforce these conditions for simplified banking

Banking is too boring to be a destination

9 out of 10 times UBank engages critical voices online they turn them into brand advocates

Start with a fresh approach to social media rather than changing fixed opinons

Social media strategy is underpinned by organisation brand values

Add the fact that it only takes 5 minutes to open a bank account (end to end including identification) and I think UBank can definitely attribute ad:tech as a lead generation category in their sales cycle.